Forum for Science, Industry and Business

Turkish delight at find of rare bird

19.10.2007

Hopes are rising for one of the world’s rarest birds after the discovery of the largest flock seen for more than 100 years.

More than 3,000 critically endangered sociable lapwings have been found in the Ceylanpinar district of south-eastern Turkey after a satellite tag was fitted to one of the birds migrating from breeding grounds in Kazakhstan.

The tracked lapwing had flown more than 2,000 miles from its nesting site, where numbers of the species have plunged following the collapse of Soviet farming. The bird flew north of the Caspian Sea, then down through the Caucasus and south into Turkey.

Other birds including geese, albatrosses and bald ibis have been fitted with satellite tags before but the sociable lapwing is the smallest bird yet to carry such a tracking device.

The RSPB’s Dr Rob Sheldon, who tagged the bird in Kazakhstan, said: “This discovery is something we didn’t dare dream of. The sociable lapwing is one of the rarest birds on earth and suddenly it’s been found in these large numbers.

“It shows just how important both Kazakhstan and Turkey have become for the survival of this species. The next step is to protect the bird, both on its breeding grounds and at all the key sites on its migration route.”

Only 200 pairs of sociable lapwing were thought to remain in 2003 when the bird was classified as critically endangered, the highest level of threat there is.

Nests at breeding sites were being trampled where land was still farmed and elsewhere, vegetation was too dense for young chicks to survive. Breeding has improved more recently, however, and conservationists feared that hunting and habitat change on migration routes were reducing the bird’s numbers.

Then, last Friday, researchers from the Turkish conservation group Doga Dernegi found 1,800 sociable lapwing in Ceylanpinar and the next day, a total of 3,200 of the birds. They were following the co-ordinates provided by satellites for the bird that had flown from Kazakhstan.

Özge Balkiz, a scientist at Doga Dernegi, said: “This is a major breakthrough in efforts to help these birds and will be enormously significant in planning their protection. They could still move on to Iraq or East Africa but if they stay in Turkey, it will be much easier to make them safe. We can keep an eye on them here, raise awareness amongst local people and work with the Turkish government to protect the areas they are using.”

The tagging project is partly paid for by the UK government’s Darwin Initiative and conservationists from Britain and Kazakhstan hope to win new funds to tag more birds next summer.

The long-term hope is that other migrating flocks will be found and that researchers can relax their efforts to help the bird.

Maxim Koshkin of the Association for the Conservation of Biodiversity in Kazakhstan, said: “Understanding the migration from breeding sites in Kazakhstan is essential for the future protection of this species, so the news of such a large flock is a great cause for celebration.”

Guven Eken, Executive Director of Doga Dernegi, said: “By tracking a single bird from its Kazakh breeding grounds, we have found the location of most of the world population of these birds in Turkey. Sociable lapwings are finally living up to their name.”

Tiny pores at a cell's entryway act as miniature bouncers, letting in some electrically charged atoms--ions--but blocking others. Operating as exquisitely sensitive filters, these "ion channels" play a critical role in biological functions such as muscle contraction and the firing of brain cells.

To rapidly transport the right ions through the cell membrane, the tiny channels rely on a complex interplay between the ions and surrounding molecules,...

The miniaturization of the current technology of storage media is hindered by fundamental limits of quantum mechanics. A new approach consists in using so-called spin-crossover molecules as the smallest possible storage unit. Similar to normal hard drives, these special molecules can save information via their magnetic state. A research team from Kiel University has now managed to successfully place a new class of spin-crossover molecules onto a surface and to improve the molecule’s storage capacity. The storage density of conventional hard drives could therefore theoretically be increased by more than one hundred fold. The study has been published in the scientific journal Nano Letters.

Over the past few years, the building blocks of storage media have gotten ever smaller. But further miniaturization of the current technology is hindered by...